Everyone who has seen at least two seasons of The Wire considers it the greatest television ever made. And it is. But a close runner-up, to my mind, is Slings and Arrows, a program about a group of Shakespearean actors that ran on Canadian television from 2003 to 2006. Different as it is from The Wire—it is billed, for one thing, as a comedy, though I would debate that categorization—Slings and Arrows shares some of the David Simon show's crucial elements: beautifully written scripts, wonderful acting, a deeply informed sense of how particular institutions work on the inside, and, above all, enormous respect for the audience's intelligence...

The show as a whole does that remarkable thing Shakespeare himself manages: to offer at once both comedy and tragedy, self-mockery and sincerity, manifestly artificial language and immediate psychological reality. Despite the fact that it is TV rather than staged performance, the emotions it provokes resemble those I have previously felt only in the live theater. As I watched the final episode of the third season last night, with tears in my eyes throughout the whole last twenty minutes—for Lear, for the actor playing Lear, for all the other players in the series, and for myself at the fact that it was coming to an end—I wondered how I was ever going to replace it.